Hacker News Reader

I remember when you could just mount \\ftp.microsoft.com\pub as a drive on your PC. Raw, unauthenticated, unencrypted SMB over the public Internet. At least it was read-only share. Good times.

View on HN

I remember Geocities pages would always be trying to read from my floppy drive. People would not realize you had to upload your pictures before other people could see them and just would put D:\pictures\goatse.jpg as the src of the img tag because they didn't really understand the web (not that I blame them.) Of course, the browser had no problem trying to load local images from untrusted code on a remote host, security policies were, uh, extremely permissive at the time.

(Of course, there would be plenty of attempting to read from the C:\ drive too, but that didn't make a loud, unexpected sound like reading from the floppy drive did)

Simple times.

Yeah, you had to remember to change all the links in the html because FrontPage Express kept saving the local full path so you could keep working on and previewing your site on a browser. HTTP server software (on Windows anyway) was so obscure that you had no idea how to get a free one running on your desktop unless you had access to Windows NT with IIS. All that changed when I installed Mandrake for the first time...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com